Ah, unbalanced shards via wrong sharding keys was an issue at one point, IIRC. I remember talking with an SRE there when something bad happened at GitHub last year, and I know that this time the current DB cluster failed.
To be clear, I _was_ mapping previous incidents with this year's incident — no competitor or hard feelings involved. I really like Vitess, fwiw. And the only thing I really love is FoundationDB :)
Side note: "Autosharding" is largely a myth that unproven databases are touting. Sharding is complex and requires planning and control. Databases that start shuffling data round without oversight produce nasty surprises. Trying to be too magic is normally always a mistake with databases.
To be clear, I _was_ mapping previous incidents with this year's incident — no competitor or hard feelings involved. I really like Vitess, fwiw. And the only thing I really love is FoundationDB :)